Environmental DNA testing around 11 wind turbines in the North Sea delivered surprising results.<\/p>\n
Water was sampled off the Norwegian Coast and analyzed for genetic traces. The species picked up included large predators like spiny dogfish and porbeagles and a massive planktivore, the basking shark. After initial environmental surveys, none of these were thought to be established in the area<\/strong>. <\/p>\n What brought the deep-sea predators and giants to the wind farm, and were researchers proved wrong?<\/p>\n The Hywind Tampen project is the world’s largest floating wind farm. Its 11 giant turbines are installed along the western edge of the Norwegian Trench, anchored to the seabed between 820 and 980 feet below the waves. These platforms operate in an environment way different from shallow-water coastal units. <\/p>\n Local fishing fleets only had interests in the shallow waters to the west of Hywind Tampen, so the much deeper offshore lease site was largely unstudied<\/strong>. It was assumed after environmental assessments that large sharks were highly unlikely to visit the area. <\/p>\n The baseline assumption was abandoned as soon as research vessels sent gillnets to the seafloor around the steel platform anchor lines.<\/p>\n Crew members began catching bottom-dwelling species<\/strong> that had never come up in the regional fishing logs before. <\/span><\/p>\n The catches proved that the sandy, almost barren seabed can support complex marine life, but biologists needed more in-depth studies to determine the full scope of species navigating these deep waters.<\/p>\n Marine biologists opted for environmental DNA water sampling<\/strong> to record every deep-sea species around Hywind Tampen, especially predators and larger species like sharks. <\/p>\n Initial tests relying on standard universal fish DNA markers showed no shark or skate signatures at all. The impression was that the ecosystem was empty, but that was false. Geneticists realized that the markers were known to fail to amplify elasmobranch DNA (which includes sharks, rays, skates, and sawfish). This came down to unique sequence variations in their mitochondrial genomes. <\/p>\n The Norwegian Research Centre and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory<\/a> formed a team and came up with a dual-primer assay developed specifically for detecting shark and skate DNA<\/strong>. <\/p>\n Field teams sampled water across a wide grid incorporating the turbine platform sites and control sites 18 miles away. They took samples from 65 feet below the surface down to the maximum 900-foot seabed depth. <\/p>\n The updated test results immediately registered blackmouth catsharks, velvet-belly lanternsharks, and thorny skates<\/strong> in the deeper levels. Closer to the surface, samples showed that wide-ocean travelers like porbeagles and basking sharks were present. <\/p>\n Yet, their presence raised a new, bigger question about species distribution and whether this was linked to wind farming<\/a>. <\/p>\n It was not the floating turbine platforms<\/a> that attracted these predators. Developers had actually built the project above a pre-existing navigation corridor<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Hywind Tampen sits above a sharp bathymetric drop-off where the continental shelf drops into the Norwegian Trench. Deep ocean currents draw nutrient-rich water upward along this slope. This attracts spiny dogfish and catsharks to the 900-foot zone. The mechanism also herds porbeagles and basking sharks through upper-surface currents as they migrate.<\/p>\n Statistical comparisons revealed identical genetic density between the zones around the turbines and distant control stations<\/strong>. This proves that operational noise and subsea high-voltage power cables have not repelled the sharks or lured them into a crowd.<\/p>\n However, environmental DNA metabarcoding only indicates that a species is present, not the population count or behavioral shifts, reports the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research<\/a>.<\/p>\n This new research shows that clean energy platforms can overlap with predator corridors without disrupting seabed communities. Establishing these natural environmental baselines<\/strong> is important now when floating wind developments are expanding into deeper global waters. Underwater acoustic monitoring systems continue to track how marine life navigates shifting offshore power grids<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Environmental DNA testing around 11 wind turbines in the North Sea delivered surprising results. Water was sampled off the Norwegian Coast and analyzed for genetic traces. The species picked up included large predators like spiny dogfish and porbeagles and a massive planktivore, the basking shark. After initial environmental surveys, none of these were thought to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":32232,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"wind","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":"Norway built a wind farm in waters where sharks were only suspected, then DNA tests revealed spiny dogfish, porbeagles, and even a basking shark.","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How assumptions about deep-sea wildlife distribution ended up flawed<\/h2>\n
New advancements to cover historical genetic blind spots<\/h2>\n
A bathymetric slope leading to an ocean highway<\/h2>\n
Energy farming operations have no effect on sharks<\/h3>\n